The George W. Bush factor

He does not speak on the stump or appear in television ads. Campaign audiences rarely hear his name.

But aside from President Obama and Mitt Romney, no one has shaped the 2012 election more than George W. Bush — on the economy and on the foreign policy issues in the spotlight during the final presidential debate on Monday.

For Mr. Romney, the battered reputation of Mr. Bush, the last Republican president, represents a burden to minimize in a tight race for the White House. The two have not appeared together this year.

When an audience member asked about Mr. Bush in the debate last week, Mr. Romney separated himself from what he characterized as Mr. Bush’s shortcomings on the budget deficit and on trade with China.

For Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush’s economic record offers a shield against voters’ wrath over high unemployment and slow growth; majorities in polls describe the nation’s economic woes as something the incumbent inherited rather than caused. But like his Republican opponent, Mr. Obama rarely invokes his predecessor’s name.

Mr. Obama benefits, too, from Americans’ weariness with the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Mr. Bush initiated. By winding them down — and by succeeding where Mr. Bush failed in hunting down Osama bin Laden — Mr. Obama has lately won higher marks from voters on foreign policy than on his job performance over all.

It is an awkward situation for Bush loyalists active in the Republican campaign this year, one they like to avoid.

“I have no interest in participating in this silly exercise,” Karl Rove, a former Bush strategist who now leads Republican “super-PAC” efforts to aid Mr. Romney, said in declining to be interviewed about Mr. Bush’s influence on this election. He left it to Democrats to assess his former boss’s impact, and they were more willing to take the bait.

“There’s no question that George Bush tarnished the Republican brand nationally on both national security and the economy,” said Mark Mellman, a pollster for many Democratic candidates, including John Kerry, Mr. Bush’s opponent in 2004. “Republicans are living with that problem.”

Less than four years after Mr. Bush left the White House, the problem is at once pervasive and inconspicuous — as the former president has been since he left the White House. As he put it in a rare interview this summer, “I crawled out of the swamp” of Washington.

“He hardly ever comes up in focus groups,” said a top campaign adviser for Mr. Bush who asked not to be named. When voters think about the Republican Party’s identity today, they are more likely to point toward the Tea Party movement.

But because of Mr. Bush, the adviser added, voters give Mr. Obama “a great deal of slack” in assigning responsibility for the weak economy.

Democratic strategists echo the point.

“I just don’t see how Obama could have survived these economic conditions without that history,” said Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and a former adviser to Bill Clinton.

Mr. Obama casts Mr. Romney’s policies as like Mr. Bush’s but as even further to the right, on taxes, regulation and a predilection for military confrontation with other countries. He generally does not mention Mr. Bush’s name, to avoid the appearance of trying too hard to pass blame to his predecessor.

“The issue isn’t to relitigate the Bush years,” said David Axelrod, the president’s political strategist. “It’s to make the case that we shouldn’t relive them.”

Mr. Romney has the tricky task of trying to mobilize the same conservative Republicans who backed Mr. Bush while casting his policies as a departure. With Democrats charging that his economic plan is like Mr. Bush’s tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 “on steroids,” Mr. Romney says his tax proposal is “not like anything that’s been tried before,” because it couples rate reductions with the elimination of some deductions.

“President Bush and I are different people, and these are different times,” Mr. Romney said in the debate last week. On trade, he said: “I’ll crack down on China. President Bush didn’t.” On the deficit, he said: “I’m going to get us to a balanced budget. President Bush didn’t.”

Separating himself from unpopular aspects of Mr. Bush’s interventionist national security posture can prove complicated for Mr. Romney, who lacks foreign policy experience. Advised by some veterans of the Bush administration, Mr. Romney uses muscular language while depicting Mr. Obama as weak in projecting America’s leadership.

Yet he embraces Mr. Obama’s plan to end the war in Afghanistan by removing troops in 2014.

Discussing Afghanistan in his debate with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, vowed to “make sure that we’re not projecting weakness abroad.” At the same time, Mr. Ryan emphasized that “we agree with the administration on their 2014 transition.”

For now, at least, that stance reflects the Bush administration’s legacy on American opinion.

“Whoever’s elected is going to have to live with the reality of what you might call intervention fatigue,” said Richard N. Haass, a State Department aide under Mr. Bush who now serves as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’s a real sense that our military interventions have not produced results that are in any way commensurate with their human and economic costs.”

Mr. Bush’s former aides chafe at criticism of his record from fellow Republicans, as well as from Democrats. Tony Fratto, a spokesman in the Bush White House and the Treasury Department, rebutted both of Mr. Romney’s barbs from the debate last week.

“There are good reasons why we didn’t balance the budget,” like the war on terrorism, Mr. Fratto said. On trade, “we were very effective with the Chinese” in paving the way for a rise in the value of its currency, to the benefit of American businesses.

But just like his former boss, who has offered only a cursory endorsement of Mr. Romney, he prefers not to say too much.

“I take my lead from President Bush,” said Mr. Fratto, who is now a partner in the consulting firm Hamilton Place Strategies. “He’s not interested in making it more difficult for the Republican nominee to get elected.

“We’ll work with the historians, and let candidates be candidates.”

Last modified: October 22, 2012
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